The Hidden Economy Driving AI

Just last week, an IT colleague and I were talking about how AI is disrupting the Big Four, and indeed many large consulting vendors, especially when considering the enormous global redundancies over the last few years.

The headcount reduction indicates that IT firms are being challenged to do more with less.

Logic dictates that the traditional ‘Land and Expand’ consultancy model which focused on maximum consultant utilisation on projects means pivoting to a new delivery model to protect their profit margin.

My colleague shared some recent ‘unusual’ cultural changes whilst on a client site, such as the use of LLM agents to capture spoken and documentary inputs from subject matter experts. He wondered if there was an ulterior motive for transcibing comments and verbal feedback from meetings when before, people had simply made their own notes.

He argued that through the process of doing their job by providing feedback, opinions and analysis, ‘employer data’ is created. Although the knowledge is ‘bought’ by employers, by altering the form of the delivery, i.e. taking the spoken word and turning it into print, the opinions, feedback and comments becomes reified.

So, what is the benefit in transcribing spoken employer data?

The uncomfortable answer may lie in the growth of AI.

AI requires a tremendous amount of ‘training’ in the form of data consumption in order to mature as a ‘sentient’ tool. Through the reification of voiced thoughts and responses during meetings, consultancies can harness skills and knowledge and use it for machine learning.

Essentially, it is as though we are being cloned out of our jobs for profit maximisation.

AI has been marketed as ‘inevitable’. We have been primed to accept and not challenge the change. Accept the disruption. Accept that this is the way it is, regardless of the ethical and moral laws that govern us as humans.

The playbook of these big ‘disruptors’ is to bypass consent. To take something without permission is theft. The execution of progress by these profit driven companies is designed to be swift and ruthless. Afterall, it is difficult to catch fast thieves. And it is even more difficult to catch theft when we do not know what is being taken from us.

Governments are either complicit or too slow to see that this is about a hidden economy that is driving AI.

This economy is the datafication of humans.

It is about finding a way to keep the expertise but delete the person so that consultancies can offer more with less.

So, while my colleague continues to work, he does it with the uncertainty of how much of ‘him’ is needed, in order to make him obsolete.